Very little is more discouraging to a website owner than to have to deal with spammers targeting their websites and email. It’s been ventured that more than 90% of email is now spam, and worse than that often spammers can get hold of your account and start sending from it, making you appear as the spammer! Often you feel helpless, and unsure how to go about making sure that this doesn’t happen in the future.
Moreover, you’re very concerned about just how much this will affect your business right now, and how it may damage your business relationships going forward, particularly if something as basic as your site email was compromised. Trust is a big factor these days, and people need to know that they can count on you and your site. Let’s look at several ways you can fight back against the spammers, and keep your site free from their clutches!
Get Rid of Catchall! – Most web hosting email accounts have a catchall feature, where undesignated mail coming to your domain ends up. This means that legitimate as well as spam could find their way there. All the spammers would have to do is type in anything at all @yourURL.com and it would find its way into that mailbox. Better to designate specifically each email account, possibly even common misspellings, and disable the catchall account completely.
Enable SpamAssassin – SpamAssassin is a powerful anti-spam tool located on the cPanel, as well as being available as an add-on for Plesk for both Windows and Linux. Enabling this tool makes it very much easier to deal with the influx of spam, as the software itself recognizes and categorizes according to your specifications. If you want to make things ultra secure, you can simply lower the score that SpamAssassin gives each email, and your standards will be adjusted accordingly. Very simple to use, this software is a must for dealing with spammers.
Register Your Domains Privately – Keeping your details out of sight makes it more difficult for problems like this to arise in the first place. An item as simple as a private domain registration can be the difference between whether or not your email gets harvested by spammers. It’s a small price to pay, and private domain registration has other benefits, as well. It can also help in disguising marketing efforts from competitors, and keeping network connections hidden. For the dollar or so they charge, it’s a no-brainer.
There’s Always BoxTrapper – BoxTrapper also resides on your control panel, but it is for more extreme situations. Say the spammers are already doing a number on your site. BoxTrapper directs all incoming email into a “box” where they have to verify their email to you before they are whitelisted. Once they do so, they don’t have to go through that process again. Obviously, this can put a damper on marketing or service oriented businesses, where you can get business from random emails. Better to deal with it on more sitewide levels, and get the problem resolved. But it’s nice to know it’s there if you need it, even if temporarily.
Keeping your email and site free from spammer’s annoying reach is a high priority task for any webmaster. Make sure you use the tools at your disposal and lock the doors!
